BALTIMORE – When the Baltimore Orioles signed Ubaldo Jimenez in February 2014 to the longest and richest contract they had ever given a free agent pitcher, four years and $50 million, it seemed a sensible, high-upside gamble for a midmarket team in need of starting pitching.
Jimenez had averaged 32½ starts, 198 innings and 13 wins over his previous six seasons. At worst, he might be the innings-eater he had been in Cleveland. At best, the ace he had once been in Colorado.
In the end, Jimenez has been neither in Baltimore, and while the Orioles have given him a seemingly endless rope for the past four years, the 33-year-old right-hander may have finally reached the end of it on Monday night. With his spot in the Orioles’ rotation already a start-by-start proposition, Jimenez blew leads of 5-0 and 6-1 against the Minnesota Twins in what became an unsightly 14-7 loss.
Jimenez’s meltdown was so sudden – with the Twins, down 6-2 at the time, ripping four consecutive hits to open the fifth inning, with the last three coming in a span of four meaty pitches – that Manager Buck Showalter didn’t have time to get a reliever ready sooner. It was the sixth time in eight starts this season Jimenez failed to get through the fifth.
Pressed by reporters after the game about Jimenez’s future, Showalter was understandably short, saying, “I understand the production hasn’t been there like it needs to be, and if there are adjustments to be made we’ll make them. But I’m certainly not going to talk about things like that in this setting.”
So we’ll talk about them here instead, and say this: it would be a mild shock if Jimenez gets another start for the Orioles any time soon.
For one thing, the stakes are too high, with the Orioles holding the third-best record in the American League but trailing the New York Yankees by 1½ games in the East, and with the Boston Red Sox coming up behind them. With Dylan Bundy’s arrival, Kevin Gausman’s potential, Chris Tillman’s track record and Wade Miley’s surprising steadiness, there is actual, front-line upside to the Orioles’ rotation for the first time in forever.
And then there is Jimenez, 1-2 with a 7.17 ERA, the latter representing the worst mark in the league among pitchers with 40 or more innings pitched. What have the Orioles gotten for their $50 million? According to Baseball-Reference.com’s WAR calculations, he has been worth exactly a win and a half over the past four seasons.
Somewhere in the back of their minds, the Orioles must also realize the window is closing on their championship hopes, with superstar Manny Machado, clubhouse leader Adam Jones and closer Zach Britton approaching free agency at the end of 2018. The Orioles simply can’t afford to keep giving Jimenez the ball under these circumstances, in hopes he will eventually straighten himself out.
There are no easily palatable options for ejecting Jimenez from the Orioles’ rotation. They could stash him in the bullpen, as they have done for brief periods in the past, and move right-hander Alec Asher – who made a pair of solid fill-in starts in the season’s first month – to the rotation. But Asher has become a valuable member of Showalter’s bullpen, and Jimenez has a career 6.41 ERA in relief. It’s hard to imagine them bringing him in with a slim, late lead in the seventh inning, when they can’t trust him to protect a five-run lead in the fifth.
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In other words, the Orioles are going to have to at least consider the possibility of releasing Jimenez. In previous years, when he was still owed tens of millions of guaranteed dollars, that was out of the question. But now that the payout would be down to around $9 million, it has to be a consideration. Owner Peter Angelos has never been one to swallow that much money – in 2005, he tried to void the contract of pitcher Sidney Ponson following the latter’s drunken-driving conviction, to avoid having to pay Ponson the $11 million he was owed. The dispute was settled for an undisclosed sum prior to an arbitrator’s ruling.
Jimenez, on the other hand, has been a clubhouse asset, popular with teammates and accountable with the media. The issues here are strictly ones of performance and patience, and much to the dismay of their fans, the Orioles have shown remarkable patience with Jimenez. For brief flashes – as when he went 3-1 with a 2.31 ERA last September, helping pitch them into the playoffs as a wild card – that patience has been rewarded.
But even for the Orioles, patience has an expiration date. For Jimenez, it would be no surprise if that date was May 22, 2017.
